As we have seen, sexological literature published between the Restoration era and the First World War is even more diverse in its conceptual base than the texts on criminology and legal medicine that we first reviewed. In this literature the old ‘pre-medical’ divisions between active/passive and natural/anti-natural/ preternatural, coexisted with the modern concepts of the psycho- pathology of the perversions. Also present were old concepts deriving from a framework based purely on anatomical character- istics such as the ‘vices of conformation’, women with oversized clitorises, hermaphroditism, together with notions that came from alienism (such as nymphomania) blended together with a marked moral tone.
Despite this eclectic conceptual mix one common point of crossover between popular sexological texts, works of general pathology, legal medicine and criminology, was the connection made between gender deviance and the sexual aberrations rather than an emphasis on actual sexual acts. In this framework, the ‘invert’ is conceived above all in this period up to the mid 1910s as someone who transgresses the limits drawn between masculin- ity and femininity; hence the recourse to the concept of hermaph- roditism (whether biological or psychical). The male invert or aesthete and the female variety, the mannish woman, display a physiognomy, form of dress and set of gestures of their own. The extent to which these characteristics were viewed as definable and real can be seen by looking beyond the medical sciences into the arts. For example, inLa Luz y La Pintura (1894), written by the ophthalmologist and President of the Academy of Fine Art, President of the Provincial Government (Diputación) and Mayor
of Cadiz, Cayetano del Toro,125 a number of guidelines are
included on how to represent figures with particular trades, temperaments and characteristics. It is worth citing at length the section devoted to the description of the aesthete, accompanied by a sketch (figure 560 in Del Toro’s book):
Aesthetes. There are certain men who are effeminate and certain women who are mannish and who have extremely marked characteristics; a true disgrace for both sexes. The effeminate man exaggerates as much as he can the movements and attitudes of women. But he becomes nothing more than a copy or imitation, a true caricature. Thus they make the tone of their voices more shrill and carry their arms closely to their torso, one folded over the other and their hands crossed in the region of the stomach. As they walk, the tips of their feet are turned inwards so imitating the sweet sway that women are obliged to undertake given the nature of their pelvic cavities and their thighs. Their faces are well cared for and shaven and it is not rare that they employ make-up and rouge or at least use powders to whiten their visage. Their lips are painted bright red or they might paint their eyelids dark, drawing an almost black horizontal line. It is not rare for them to paint beauty spots on their cheeks, or for them to wear their hair long, shiny and combed into partings. They often use a necktie or brightly coloured cravat, a very clean shirt, tight clothing, generally trousers, waistcoat and short jacket, sometimes of velvet. Some dress in a blouse instead of a jacket and wear a little felt hat or cap with or without a peak and with a tie or multicoloured adornment behind. Others, carrying much further the imitation, pierce their ears and wear earrings, and others still mortify their bodies with corsets. They clean their hands carefully and wear rings, if they can, and carry a fan or handkerchief.126
The actual sexual contact between individuals of the same sex is considered as just one more aspect of the make-up of the invert. For this reason, to return to Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo, these authors continued to consider ‘pseudo-inverts’ as part of the broader class of inverts who were active and dominant in their relations. Letamendi had described his ‘homo- erasts’ as an effect of atavistic hermaphroditism. In reality, the homosexual, as a different personage, had not yet been distin- guished from the invert. The same phenomenon will be encoun- tered later when we discuss some aspects of the conceptual basis of psychiatry. It would seem that this lack of specificity and the predominance of gender deviance as a trait of the invert would
mark Spain as different from the United States and some Euro- pean countries around 1900.127 It would appear that Spain had
more in common in this sense with, for example, Argentina.128
Another clear example of the connotations around gender deviance that inversion primarily invoked can be drawn from the medical profession. A clinical case study was published in 1892 in the prestigious reviewEl Siglo Médicoby Vicente Ots Esquerdo. Ots Esquerdo was the medical doctor of Carabanchel mental asylum and one of the first degenerationist psychiatrists. The case related by the doctor was termed ‘Inversión Sexual Intelectiva Sis- temática’ [Systematic Intellective Sexual Inversion]. According to the author of the report, who considered himself to be well informed with respect to the ‘phrenopathic literature’ of the period, no ‘case of similar delirium’ had been found in the annals of psychiatry.129
The case history is one of a 36-year-old woman identified only by the initials ‘R. N.’ who was married and had five children. The sudden death of one of her children produced in her ‘una serie de ataques de naturaleza francamente histérica, seguidos más tarde de trastornos psíquicos e impulsos suicidas’ [a series of attacks of a frankly hysterical nature, followed later by psychic upsets and suicidal impulses]. The woman stated that she did not know her own father and that the latter had handed her over when still a child to a guardian. A revelation follows: ‘Hasta los cinco años fue un chicho rollizo y bien conformado aparente- mente, que se llamaba Timoteo’ [Up to the age of five, she was a healthy lad who was apparently well formed, and went by the name of Timoteo]. But when his tutor discovered a genital anomaly he was operated upon and was designated a woman. At the age of fifteen, as a result of a secret sexual relationship, she became pregnant and gave birth to a ‘monster’, the doctor noted, which died shortly afterwards. A year later, she was secuestered, taken to North Africa and was sold to a Moroccan who incorpo- rated her into his harem. She became pregnant once again and once more gave birth to a monstrous child. She then escaped her captor and roamed through different lands finally arriving in Tangiers. From here, she made her way to Madrid ‘y como llamase la atención por las formas y aspecto afeminado de su cuerpo, pidió ropas de mujer, y vestida con este traje entró de criada en una casa’ [and as her effeminate form and general aspect drew attention, she asked for female clothing and thus
dressed became a servant]. When she was nineteen a beard began to grow; she was considered to be male and was expelled from the house in which she served. Some time later, once more in the hands of her tutor, ‘volvió a tomar todas las apariencias de mujer, permitiéndole esta retrocesión a su falso sexo trabajar como triple bailarina en el Real’ [she once again took female clothes and this return to her false sex allowed her to become a dancer in the Royal Ballet]. Soon afterwards, she fell into a state of dementia and was married off to the man who was at the time of writing, 1892, still her husband. She became pregnant eight times, none of which entailed a monstrous birth. For this reason, she believed that her children were not really hers but that she had been tricked into thinking so.130
The woman stated that six years previously she had had a hallucinatory experience while listening to the National Anthem and this allowed her to shake herself out of the daze in which she had hitherto lived. She then began to recall all the events of her past life. From that moment on, she tried to recover her ‘posición, traje, costumbres, etc., adecuados a su verdadero sexo; pero su marido y tutor’ [position, dress, customs, etc., appropriate to her true sex, but her tutor and husband] stopped her and they were ‘empeñados en que siguiese siendo mujer’ [determined that she continued to be a woman]. Ots Esquerdo recorded that she begged them for ‘un traje de hombre y la dejemos en libertad, que ella se buscará una casa, café o fonda, donde sea admitida como criado’ [men’s clothing and that we leave her in peace. She would find a house, café or inn where she could be admitted as a servant].
The psychiatrist, on describing R. N.’s desire to be recognised as a man, remarked that the subject presented ‘una lucidez perfecta en todas sus manifestaciones intelectuales, y en ninguna ocasión hemos observado la menor incoherencia mental’ [perfect lucidity in all her intellectual manifestations, and on no occasion have we observed the least mental incoherence]. In order to diagnose the case, Ots Esquerdo summed up all the facts and considered the various classifications available to him. He decided that hers was not a case of ‘instinctive sexual inversion’ as described by Westphal, because this state indicated an exclusively genital basis, that is, sexual attraction towards members of the same sex. Here, ‘el cambio de sexo no es un pretexto para buscar las caricias y atenciones de la mujer, sino que, al contrario,
procura apartarse de todas sus compañeras siempre que dejan al descubierto alguna de las regiones ocultas de su cuerpo’ [the sex change is not a pretext in order to seek the attention and caresses of women but, on the contrary, she always tries to distance herself from her female companions when they uncover any parts of their body].131
Ots Esquerdo did not believe that he was before a case of erotomania, either. There were no indices of ‘erotic madness’ in this case, or of any ‘persecution delirium’. It was not a case of ‘dual consciousness’ or one of ‘dual personality’ since the two consciousnesses, those of man and woman, did not coexist in the woman. Instead of all these diagnoses, Ots Esquerdo came up with a completely novel one: ‘systematic intellective sexual inver- sion’. In one sense this was sexual inversion like other cases. But this form of sexual inversion demanded that the person inte- grated this state ‘en su verdadero derecho a participar de los vestidos, trabajos, derechos y deberes del sexo contrario, del masculino’ [into their real right to share the clothes, labours, rights and duties of the opposite sex, the male sex].132We are not
faced with a perversion of the sexual instinct, however; what we have here is an alteration of the representation of the sex of the person. As such, it relied upon an intellectual basis not an instinctual one.
In terms of aetiology, Ots Esquerdo revealed the degeneration- ist basis of his diagnosis and he tried to explain the disease as the consequence of morbid inheritance, even though he admitted that he was unable to detect any illustrative antecedents.133
The case of R. N. is illuminating because it described the subversion of gender roles but did not allude to any sexual transgression. Why was sexual inversion mainly ascribed to acts of gender deviance rather than to those of sexuality? One reason may be, as we have already noted, that as the medicalization of homosexuality in Spain did not respond to a campaign for the decriminalization of same-sex acts, there was less emphasis on the sexual aspects of the question. There was no specific legislation at the time on homosexuality, even though the elastic interpretation of ‘crimes against decency’ and ‘sodomy’ could result in prosecu- tion. This is one hypothesis, but in any event, the Spanish situation appears to be similar to that of France,134 where there
was also concern about broad gender aspects such as the ‘de- virilization’ of the race, as expressed in the words of many
politicians, doctors and legal experts in the last years of the nineteenth century as well as certain laws against cross-dressing.
In Spain at the same time, medicine, pedagogy, religion, philanthropy, the novel and the arts were all engaged in drawing clear demarcations between the sexes and, therefore, between the public and private, between production and reproduction, as a way of guaranteeing the family and national identity. Doctors were interested in sexuality because it was one way of regulating family life as the repository of privacy and affection. Jo Labanyi has described how the writers of Restoration novels (Galdós, Pardo Bazán, Valera, Clarín, amongst others) effectively functioned as a technology of government and a way of producing ‘Spaniards’, in the same way as Cánovas through his centralizing policies and state construction hoped to create a feeling of nationhood.135
This is a project which has been described as ‘the nationalization of the masses’.136 One place where these subjects are manufac-
tured is the domestic scenario, characterized by a clear dividing line between maleness and femaleness. The rogue figures in this domestic scene are the adulterous women137and weak or effemi-
nate men who are not strong enough to rule the roost. The passive husband faced his counterpart in the dominant wife, who was often termed amarimacho.138Seducers and perverts of various
descriptions also found a home amongst those who constituted a threat to family life and they inundate the pages of the realist and naturalist novel.139 To figures such as these, the presence of the
invert in the large cities is to be added. This presence was increasingly remarked upon for example in the work of Tardieu (1863), in the autochthonous workLa Mala Vida en Madridand in Max Bembo’s 1912 work. This preoccupation was no doubt in part a result of the rapid urban expansion experienced between 1877 and 1900 in Spain and the high levels of internal male migration to the industrialized Basque Country and Catalonia or to cities based on services, such as Madrid.140
In France, the concern over lost virility was intricately con- nected to fears of a low birth rate. The absence of a numerically strong and physically vigorous race, doctors and national pundits warned, resulted from the use of contraception (the ‘birth strike’), the proliferation of ‘conjugal fraud’ (non-reproductive sex), the sexual aberrations and the exhaustion of the nervous system as a result of over-refinement and a life of increased luxury
amongst the upper classes. Rivalry with Germany, which was perceived as vibrant and disciplined, merely served to exacerbate this feeling.
But in Spain, preoccupation with the genders did not arise from a concern over a low birth rate. The birth rate remained high, except for Catalonia, in all regions around 1900.141 Loss of
virility was instead associated with the decline of political and military clout; a fear that was clearly expressed in elocutions such as that of Lord Salisbury’s ‘dying nations’ speech.142 Political
instability, economic dependence on other countries, the lack of individual initiative, corruption, favouritism and class struggle accounted for the rest. These factors, discussed extensively in Chapter Five, were in turn attributed to a lack of will power and organic coherence of the nation and the exhaustion of collective energy, all of which were seen to have resulted in the decline of the ‘race’.
A further factor causing concern with respect to gendered relations was the rise of an incipient culture of consumption amongst the richer urban classes in the latter years of the nineteenth century.143 The tastes and excesses once reserved for
the aristocracy seemed to have reached the ‘middle classes’: ‘El amor excesivo al lujo y a los placeres entre las clases más instruidas de la sociedad, [es] una de las causas que más influyen en el desarrollo de la prostitución clandestina’ [The excessive taste for luxuries and pleasure amongst the educated classes of society [is] one of the causes of greatest influence in the develop- ment of covert prostitution], noted one social analyst. Certain customs had spread from the aristocracy to the other social classes ‘de modo que ciertas costumbres, no bien anotadas en el código de la moral, que antes constituyeron un privilegio de la aristocra- cia, hoy día se han democratizado y han penetrado en las clases sociales que se hallan ligadas con ella’ [Because of this certain customs not mentioned in the moral code and which were formerly the privilege of the aristocracy have nowadays become democratized and have been adopted by those social classes that are connected to it [the aristocracy].]144
The seeking of luxury which drives women to forget their obligations as wives and mothers, the attraction of young men and women to the sensuous life of Bohemia, aestheticism and to passing pleasures,145 are the targets of this disciplinary discourse.
inversion itself were seen as foreign imports, particularly French ones. According to commentators of the time, this resulted in the denaturalization of gender relations and neglect of the task of each sex; maternity was under attack as the number of effeminate men continued to rise. Adultery and the ‘sexual aberrations’ were seen to be related to the consumption of superfluous goods, which extended the gap between the natural and the non-natural, between the masculine and feminine. As we will now see, the new psychiatry of the beginning of the twentieth century also responded to these concerns as it continued to place sexual deviation within the broad remit of gender transgression.